4. The book is also available at the Internet Archive in various formats: download page.

Robert W. Williams' Notes:

1.1 While Du Bois elaborated on the idea of the Talented Tenth, Henry Lyman Morehouse is considered to have invented the term in 1896 (see Christopher George Buck's "Talented Tenth" [PDF file] (pp.1295-7 in Richard T. Schaefer (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, v.3 (Sage Publications, 2008)).

1.2. Morehouse's essay on "The Talented Tenth" can be read here at webdubois.org.

2.1. In 1948 Du Bois revisited his concept of the Talented Tenth in an address before the social organization, Sigma Pi Phi. Entitled "The Talented Tenth Memorial Address" (TTMA), it was published in The Boulé Journal, v.15, n.1 (October 1948) [full text]. He presented a modification of his original idea:

[....] Here comes a new idea for a Talented Tenth: The concept of a group-leadership, [sic] not simply educated and self-sacrificing, but with clear vision of present world conditions and dangers, and conducting American Negroes to alliance with culture groups in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, and looking toward a new world culture. We can do it. We have the ability. The only question is, have we the will?

This calls for leadership through special organization. Such organization calls for more than a tenth of our number. One one-hundredth, or thirty thousand persons is indicated, with a directing council composed of educated and specially trained experts in the main branches of science and the main categories of human work, and a paid executive committee of five or six persons to carry out the program.

The address reflects his increasing use of Marxian ideas and theory. At the end he said:
"This, then, in my re-examined and restated theory of the "Talented Tenth," which has thus become the doctrine of the "Guiding Hundredth."

2.2. My thanks to Dr. Paul C. Taylor for sendng me the link to the TTMA.

3. Juan Battle and Earl Wright II published "W. E. B. Du Bois's Talented Tenth: A Quantitative Assessment" in the Journal of Black Studies, 32:6 (2002):654-672. It can be downloaded from Dr. Wright's web site as a PDF file.

A strong plea for the higher education of the Negro, which those who are
interested in the future of the freedmen cannot afford to ignore. Prof.
DuBois produces ample evidence to prove conclusively the truth of his
statement that "to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common
and industrial school training, without first providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds."

This "abstract", occupying the first page of the chapter, highlighted a central point of the essay. The authorship of the abstract is unclear.

The picture comes from the digital copy of the book available at the Internet Archive. The pages before and after the portrait of Du Bois, which was on its own page, were intentionally blank.

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal
with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this
race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of
the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a
difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational
experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the
object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily
men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess
artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make
manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad
sympathy, knowledge
of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must
underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill
of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man
mistake the means of living for the object of life.

If this be true—and who can deny it—three tasks lay before me; first to
show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among
American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how
these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their
relation to the Negro problem.

The three goals of the essay.

You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has
been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and
elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded
their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what
is slavery but
the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of
natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the
first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for
natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In colonial days came
Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice;
and Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker, voiced their longings when he
said to Thomas Jefferson, "I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am
of the African race, and in colour which is natural to them, of the
deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the
Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you that I am not
under that state of tyrannical thraldom and inhuman captivity to which too
many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the
fruition of those blessings which proceed from that free and unequalled
liberty with which you are favored, and which I hope you will willingly
allow, you have mercifully received from the immediate hand of that Being from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift.

Social Darwinist-style language: Slavery as "the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership[.] Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest."

The direct quotation from Benjamin Banneker is from his letter of 19 August 1791 to Thomas Jefferson (then U.S. Secretary of State) is found in John H.B. Latrobe's Memoir of Benjamin Banneker Read before the Maryland Historical Society at the Monthly Meeting, May 1, 1845 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1845) at p.15. It is interesting to note Jefferson's response on 30 August 1791, which is quoted verbatim and in its entirety here:

Sir,—I thank you sincerely for your letter of the
19th instant, and for the Almanac it contained.
Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs
as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black
brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors
of men, and that the appearance of a want of them
is owing merely to the degraded condition of their
existence, both in Africa and America. I can add
with truth, that nobody wishes more ardently to
see a good system commenced for raising the condition
both of their body and mind to what it ought
to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence,
and other circumstances which cannot be
neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of
sending your Almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet,
Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and
member of the Philanthropic Society, because I
considered it as a document to which your color had
a right for their justification against the doubts
which have been entertained of them. I am, with
great esteem, Sir, your most obedient humble
servant.

"Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms of the
British crown were exerted with every powerful effort, in order to reduce
you to a state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of
dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every
human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore
the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a
serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential
preservation, you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and
tranquility which you enjoy, you have mercifully received, and that a
peculiar blessing of heaven.

The quotation from Banneker continues.

"This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state
of Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its
condition. It was then that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that
you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy
to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'"

The quotation from Banneker continues and then ends in this paragraph.

Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush
something of medicine, and Lemuel Haynes, to whom Middlebury College gave
an honorary A.M. in 1804. These and others we may call the Revolutionary
group of distinguished Negroes—they were persons of marked ability,
leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among the best of
their time. They strove by word and deed to save the color line from
becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do was
nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold. So they passed into
forgetfulness.

DuBois had argued in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896) that the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, among related devices by others, had helped to perpetuate slavery by making the cotton industry more efficient (see Sec.74: p.152 [Google Books]).

But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of
the century came other exceptional men. Some were natural sons of
unnatural fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race of educated mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men's rights. There was Ira Aldridge, whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying
in the Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:

"I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is
asleep, or that he made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their
mines and work their farms, or they cannot believe history, sacred or
profane. I ask every man who has a heart, and is blessed with the
privilege of believing—Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures?
Do you say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and
permits them to keep our fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children
in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families,
would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us
and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a
people were afflicted with since the world began—I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have never given you the least provocation—would He be to us a God of Justice? If you will allow that we are men, who feel for
each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children,
cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders
with which you have and do continue to afflict us?"

The quoted passage is by David Walker (1785-1830) from the Preamble (p.8) in his Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Boston: David Walker, 1830) [Entire volume at the Internet Archive].

This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to
the terrors of abolitionism.

In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which
the world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race
and slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that "Laws as
cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many
places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren
(without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the
very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion—looks noble and
prides himself because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side
this free Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until
they merged into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of
the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great
abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man
became the first subscriber to Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when
Negro soldiers made the Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders
worked shoulder to shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of
which would have been impossible without them. There was Purvis and
Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander
Crummel, [sic] and above all, Frederick Douglass—what would the abolition
movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the
possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well
wrought culture said silently
more than all the drawn periods of
orators—they were the men who made American slavery impossible. As Maria
Weston Chapman once said, from the school of anti-slavery agitation "a
throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of
color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and
aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both
races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and
it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a
white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble
influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in
slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even
in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the
elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society,
the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the
noblest temples."

In his John Brown (1909) DuBois quoted a long passage from the 1831 convention (on pp.236-238), citing a long direct quotation, provided by George W. Williams, as the source (see pp.65-66 in G.W. Williams, The History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, v.2, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1883).
[Citation for DuBois's John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1909.]

The passage from Maria Weston Chapman is quoted directly in William Cooper Nell's The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855) at pp.347-348; and in George W. Williams' The History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, v.2 (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1883) at pp.79-80.

Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick
Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like
Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith, graduated from famous foreign
universities. Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York
and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of
Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.

After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders:
Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political
organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these
men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at
them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at
the plow and not in the Senate—a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred
and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling
was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred
and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow,
but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic status,
he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of
rascals, that he now is. This all sane men know even if they dare not say
it.

And so we come to the present—a day of cowardice and vacillation, of
strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced
dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the
Negro people? The "exceptions" of course. And yet so sure as this Talented
Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in
alarm: "These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these
are the happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation
made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched
Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous,
crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and
made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was
able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A
saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires,
continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional
it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the
capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever
stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood,
well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no
breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and
usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure
of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is
it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such
aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back
into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers
have raised themselves?

Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and
character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the
bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top
downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that
are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of
human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that
progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few
already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the
risen down.

How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands
of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and
most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and
universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the
university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it—I
willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar
curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the
transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation,
through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no
other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or
nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of
training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and
necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their
bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in
the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the
colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase,
Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and
civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build?
At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth.
Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge,
down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice
strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded
colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the
normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered
other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek
and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000
others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the
alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of
property. It was a miracle—the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th
century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us
that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of
education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and
hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find
them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life—why, what has
Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly.

Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test
of time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life,
really live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their
less fortunate fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have
not actually graduated students from a college course, there are to-day in
the United States thirty-four institutions giving something above high
school training to Negroes and designed especially for this race.

Three of these were established in border States before the War; thirteen
were planted by the Freedmen's Bureau in the years 1864-1869; nine were
established between 1870 and 1880 by various church bodies; five were
established after 1881 by Negro churches, and four are state institutions
supported by United States' agricultural funds. In most cases the college
departments are small adjuncts to high and common school work. As a matter
of fact six institutions—Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Shaw, Wilberforce and
Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and number
of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred and
fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these
colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a
typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University. Here students from the
grammar grades, after a three years' high school course, take a college
course of 136 weeks. One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek;
one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and
social science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to
mathematics, and one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy.

DuBois discussed the history and significance of Atlanta University in his chapter for the 1905 book, From Servitude to Service: Being the Old South Lectures on the History and Work of Southern Institutions for the Education of the Negro (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1905) [Available at the Internet Archive: search results page].

In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern
colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin
College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen
elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color
prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even
to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other
leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was
the great pioneer in the work of blotting out the color line in colleges,
and has more Negro graduates by far than any other Northern college.

The total number of Negro college graduates up to 1899, (several of the
graduates of that year not being reported), was as follows:

The graph below is reproduced from the Internet Archive's digital version of the text. The Atlanta University Publication (AUP), No. 5, The College-Bred Negro (1900) presents the same data (see p.42).

Of these graduates 2,079 were men and 252 were women; 50 per cent. of
Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their
people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent. of
the Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and
broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some
degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black
neighbors and relatives.

The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial question,
to be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living? It
has been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has
resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could find nothing to
do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a
colored college man working at menial service, etc. Fortunately, returns
as to occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta
conference, are quite full—nearly sixty per cent. of the total number of graduates.

This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions as to the occupations
of all college-bred Negroes. Of 1,312 persons reported, there were:

The graph below is reproduced from the Google Books digital version of the text; its data can be found in the Atlanta University Publication (AUP), No. 5, The College-Bred Negro (1900), p.63.

Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students
and professional men; over 6 per cent. are farmers, artisans and
merchants, and 4 per cent. are in government service. In detail the
occupations are as follows:

These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro.
He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of
the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social
movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people need social
leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall
back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well
defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully
evolved. The preacher was, even before the war, the group leader of the
Negroes, and the church their greatest social institution. Naturally this
preacher was ignorant and often immoral, and the problem of replacing the
older type by better educated men has been a difficult one. Both by direct
work and by direct influence on other preachers, and on congregations, the
college-bred preacher has an opportunity for reformatory work and moral
inspiration, the value of which cannot be overestimated.

AUP No. 5 contains this paragraph verbatim (on p.65).

It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the Negro college
has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how vast a work, how
mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To furnish five millions
and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood, in
one generation, was not only a very difficult undertaking, but a very
important one, in that, it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro
child an attainable ideal. It brought the masses of the blacks in contact
with modern civilization, made black men the leaders of their communities
and trainers of the new generation. In this work college-bred Negroes were
first teachers, and then teachers of teachers. And here it is that the
broad culture of college work has been of peculiar value. Knowledge of
life and its wider meaning, has been the point of the Negro's deepest
ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been
simply for bread winning, but also for human culture, has been of
inestimable value in the training of these men.

AUP No. 5 contains this paragraph verbatim (on p.65).

In earlier years the two occupations of preacher and teacher were
practically the only ones open to the black college graduate. Of later
years a larger diversity of life among his people, has opened new avenues
of employment. Nor have these college men been paupers and spendthrifts;
557 college-bred Negroes owned in 1899, $1,342,862.50 worth of real
estate, (assessed value) or $2,411 per family. The real value of the total
accumulations of the whole group is perhaps about $10,000,000, or $5,000 a
piece. Pitiful, is it not, beside the fortunes of oil kings and steel
trusts, but after all is the fortune of the millionaire the only stamp of
true and successful living? Alas! it is, with many, and there's the rub.

AUP No. 5 contains the first two sentences of this paragraph verbatim (on p.65).

The problem of training the Negro is to-day immensely complicated by the
fact that the whole question of the efficiency and appropriateness of our
present systems of education, for any kind of child, is a matter of active
debate, in which final settlement seems still afar off. Consequently it
often happens that persons
arguing for or against certain systems of
education for Negroes, have these controversies in mind and miss the real
question at issue. The main question, so far as the Southern Negro is
concerned, is: What under the present circumstance, must a system of
education do in order to raise the Negro as quickly as possible in the
scale of civilization? The answer to this question seems to me clear: It
must strengthen the Negro's character, increase his knowledge and teach
him to earn a living. Now it goes without saying, that it is hard to do
all these things simultaneously or suddenly, and that at the same time it
will not do to give all the attention to one and neglect the others; we
could give black boys trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of
ex-slaves; we might simply increase their knowledge of the world, but this
would not necessarily make them wish to use this knowledge honestly; we
might seek to strengthen character and purpose, but to what end if this
people have nothing to eat or to wear? A system of education is not one
thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter
of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and
without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. If then we
start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a heritage of bad
habits, our system of training must set before itself two great aims—the
one dealing with knowledge and character, the other part seeking to give
the child the technical knowledge necessary for him to earn a living under
the present circumstances. These objects are accomplished in part by the
opening of the common schools on the one, and of the industrial schools on
the other. But only in part, for there must also be trained those who are
to teach these schools—men and women of knowledge and culture and
technical skill who understand modern civilization, and have the training
and aptitude to impart it to the children under them. There must be
teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to attempt to establish any sort
of a system of common
and industrial school training, without first
(and I say first advisedly) without first providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds. School houses do not teach themselves—piles of brick and mortar
and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul,
cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the
real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they
be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter
days, has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by
ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of
higher training which made the Negro public school possible, and make
Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and
Straight, those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the
abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South the
teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work of these higher
schools, are using to teach their own new experiments. If Hampton,
Tuskegee and the hundred other industrial schools prove in the future to
be as successful as they deserve to be, then their success in training
black artisans for the South, will be due primarily to the white colleges
of the North and the black colleges of the South, which trained the
teachers who to-day conduct these institutions. There was a time when the
American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at
one end and Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of
human training. But in these eager days it would seem that we have changed
all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer
to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark
Hopkins.

I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity of
teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully;
or seem
to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial
schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I do say, and
insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk with its vision of success,
to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the
training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and
to teach the teachers of the public schools.

But I have already said that human education is not simply a matter of
schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life—the training
of one's home, of one's daily companions, of one's social class. Now the
black boy of the South moves in a black world—a world with its own
leaders, its own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he gets by far
the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes of this dark
world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the
education which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the
group-leaders of the Negro people—the physicians and clergymen, the
trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him of
all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of the surrounding
world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the higher
schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be neglected? Can we
afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the leaders of thought among
Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that they will have no
leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained demagogues will still hold
the places they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous
busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice; either you must help
furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained
leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless
misguided rabble.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black
boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the founding of
Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education since the
war, has been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless, I insist
that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is
to make carpenters men; there are two means of making the carpenter a man,
each equally important: the first is to give the group and community in
which he works, liberally trained teachers and leaders to teach him and
his family what life means; the second is to give him sufficient
intelligence and technical skill to make him an efficient workman; the
first object demands the Negro college and college-bred men—not a
quantity of such colleges, but a few of excellent quality; not too many
college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to
raise the Talented Tenth to leadership; the second object demands a good
system of common schools, well-taught, conveniently located and properly
equipped.

The Sixth Atlanta Conference truly said in 1901:

The extended quotation from the Sixth Atlanta Conference is not found in Atlanta University Publication , No. 6: The Negro Common School (1901). However, certain pages of AUP No. 6 contain elements: on pages 85, 91, 94.

"We call the attention of the Nation to the fact that less than one
million of the three million Negro children of school age, are at present
regularly attending school, and these attend a session which lasts only a
few months.

"We are to-day deliberately rearing millions of our citizens in ignorance,
and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by educational
qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the land have no
opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher. In the
discussion as to the proper training of Negro children after they leave
the public schools, we have forgotten that they are not yet decently
provided with public schools.

"Propositions are beginning to be made in the South to reduce the already
meagre school facilities of Negroes. We congratulate the South on
resisting, as much as it has, this pressure, and on the many millions it
has spent on Negro education. But it is only fair to point out that Negro
taxes and the Negroes' share of the income from indirect taxes and
endowments have fully repaid this expenditure, so that the Negro public
school system has not in all probability cost the white taxpayers a single
cent since the war.

"This is not fair. Negro schools should be a public burden, since they are
a public benefit. The Negro has a right to demand good common school
training at the hands of the States and the Nation since by their fault he
is not in position to pay for this himself."

What is the chief need for the building up of the Negro public school in
the South? The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day above all
else. This is the concurrent testimony of all who know the situation. For
the supply of this great demand two things are needed—institutions of
higher education and money for school houses and salaries. It is usually
assumed that a hundred or more institutions for Negro training are to-day
turning out so many teachers and college-bred men that the race is
threatened with an over-supply.
This is sheer nonsense. There are to-day
less than 3,000 living Negro college graduates in the United States, and
less than 1,000 Negroes in college. Moreover, in the 164 schools for
Negroes, 95 per cent. of their students are doing elementary and secondary
work, work which should be done in the public schools. Over half the
remaining 2,157 students are taking high school studies. The mass of
so-called "normal" schools for the Negro, are simply doing elementary
common school work, or, at most, high school work, with a little
instruction in methods. The Negro colleges and the post-graduate courses
at other institutions are the only agencies for the broader and more
careful training of teachers. The work of these institutions is hampered
for lack of funds. It is getting increasingly difficult to get funds for
training teachers in the best modern methods, and yet all over the South,
from State Superintendents, county officials, city boards and school
principals comes the wail, "We need TEACHERS!" and teachers must be
trained. As the fairest minded of all white Southerners, Atticus G.
Haygood, once said: "The defects of colored teachers are so great as to
create an urgent necessity for training better ones. Their excellencies
and their successes are sufficient to justify the best hopes of success in
the effort, and to vindicate the judgment of those who make large
investments of money and service, to give to colored students opportunity
for thoroughly preparing themselves for the work of teaching children of
their people."

The quotation by Atticus Greene Haygood is from his The Case of the Negro, as to Education in the Southern States; A Report to the Board of Trustees [John F. Slater Fund] (Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison & Co., 1885), at p.14. [Accessible at the Internet Archive].

The truth of this has been strikingly shown in the marked improvement of
white teachers in the South. Twenty years ago the rank and file of white
public school teachers were not as good as the Negro teachers. But they,
by scholarships and good salaries, have been encouraged to thorough normal
and collegiate preparation, while the Negro teachers have been discouraged
by starvation wages and the idea that any training will do for a black
teacher. If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as
carpenters. But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching
is wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse
them living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense.

The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report for 1900:
"For comparison between the white and colored enrollment in secondary and
higher education, I have added together the enrollment in high schools and
secondary schools, with the attendance on colleges and universities, not
being sure of the actual grade of work done in the colleges and
universities. The work done in the secondary schools is reported in such
detail in this office, that there can be no doubt of its grade."

The quotation from the U.S. Commissioner of Education is also found in Atlanta University Publication, No. 6: The Negro Common School (1901), pp.117-118.

He then makes the following comparisons of persons in every million
enrolled in secondary and higher education:

Whole Country.

Negroes.

1880

4,362

1,289

1900

10,743

2,061

And he concludes: "While the number in colored high schools and colleges
had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept pace
with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from 30 per cent.
to 24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored pupils, one (1) in
one hundred was engaged in secondary and higher work, and that ratio has
continued substantially for the past twenty years. If the ratio of colored
population in secondary and higher education is to be equal to the average
for the whole country, it must be increased to five times its present
average." And if this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is
safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies.
How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We need Negro
teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class normal
schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher Negro
education and it must be done.

Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of
civilization, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the
carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for
trade schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things as
people once thought. The original idea was that the "Industrial" school
was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing to work for
it; it was to "do" things—i.e.: become a center of productive industry,
it was to be partially, if not wholly, self-supporting, and it was to
teach trades. Admirable as were some of the ideas underlying this scheme,
the whole thing simply would not work in practice; it was found that if
you were to use time and material to teach trades thoroughly, you could
not at the same time keep the industries on a commercial basis and make
them pay. Many schools started out to do this on a large scale and went
into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found also that it was possible
to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him the full
educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was a
distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes in
carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not actually
learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade, that a
noticeable change has come over the industrial schools. In the first place
the idea of commercially remunerative industry in a school is being pushed
rapidly to the back-ground. There are still schools with shops and farms
that bring an income, and schools that use student labor partially for the
erection of their buildings and the furnishing of equipment. It is coming
to be seen, however, in the education of the Negro, as clearly as it has
been seen in the education of the youths the world over, that it is the
boy and not the material product, that is the true object of education.
Consequently the object of the industrial school came to be the thorough
training of boys regardless of the cost of the training, so long as it was
thoroughly well done.

Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not surmounted. In the
first place modern industry has taken great strides since the war, and the
teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long
processes of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the
ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be to-day an
intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to
thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To meet this
situation the industrial schools began a further development; they
established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training of better
class artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve for the
purposes of general education, such of the simpler processes of elementary
trade learning as were best suited therefor. In this differentiation of
the Trade School and manual training, the best of the industrial schools
simply followed the plain trend of the present educational epoch. A
prominent educator tells us that, in Sweden, "In the
beginning the
economic conception was generally adopted, and everywhere manual training
was looked upon as a means of preparing the children of the common people
to earn their living. But gradually it came to be recognized that manual
training has a more elevated purpose, and one, indeed, more useful in the
deeper meaning of the term. It came to be considered as an educative
process for the complete moral, physical and intellectual development of
the child."

The quotation on Swedish education can be found in Isaac Edwards Clarke's Art and Industry: Education in the Industrial and Fine Arts in the United States; Pt.2, Industrial and Manual Training in Public Schools (Washington, D.C., U.S. Office of Education, 1892), at p.907[About-this-book page at Google Books].

Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training schools
we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and chief
support. There was a time when any aged and wornout carpenter could teach
in a trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for college-bred
men by a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr. Booker T. Washington the
firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers the son of a
Negro senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and graduated at
Harvard; the son of a
Negro congressman and lawyer, trained in Latin and
mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife, a woman who
read Virgil and Homer in the same class room with me; he has as college
chaplain, a classical graduate of Atlanta University; as teacher of
science, a graduate of Fisk; as teacher of history, a graduate of
Smith,—indeed some thirty of his chief teachers are college graduates,
and instead of studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying
pianos for dirty cabins, they are at Mr. Washington's right hand helping
him in a noble work. And yet one of the effects of Mr. Washington's
propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the expediency of such training
for Negroes, as these persons have had.

DuBois is probably referencing Up from Slavery, in which Washington wrote (p.122): "In fact, one of the saddest things I saw during the month of travel which I have described was a young man, who had attended some high school, sitting down in a one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar."
[Citation: B.T. Washington. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901)

Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race
transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you
like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do
not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the
levers to uplift a
people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by
the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply
teach work—it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must
be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The
Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men.

[End of DuBois' original text.]

Please consider a contribution to the upkeep of <www.webdubois.org>.
PayPal offers a secure way for you to help me with my goal to find and present more works by and about W.E.B. Du Bois. Thank you.